🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3hp0dv$dsk@nntp1.u.washington.edu>,
beau paisley <paisley@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>This thread truly amazes me.  Some of the most sophisticated and advanced
>software exists in the math software market.  (replacing
>a symbolic package is a couple orders of magnitude above replacing
>a grep replacement or yet another editor.)

What about compilers for C, C++, Objective C, Fortran and Ada?  The GNU
compiler is widely acknowledged to be one of the highest quality compilers
available for many architectures, and without question the most portable
compiler in existence.  What about a whole Operating System kernel?  Linux
is comparable in quality to the best commercial Unix-variants and more
"feature-rich" than most of them.

Mathematica is a powerful, complex piece of software... but there are
many free high-quality software packages that exceed it in complexity.

>If we want professional
>supported math software it costs.  You don't get professional support
>and continued development of these types of packages without paying.

Paying, schmaying.  This isn't about "not paying", this is about openness,
reasonable licenses, etc.  I use a lot of commercial software, but I'd 
rather give my money to reasonable companies than paranoid egomaniacs like
Stephen Wolfram.

>The GNU mentality prevalent in Rich's original posting is sad.  I almost
>start to believe that people are falling for this.  Remember the 
>seat-of-the-pants, hacker heritage behind GNU!  Microsofts method
>of degrading the quality of software in the market has now truly been
>exceeded by GNU!

Huh?  You get your kicks throwing around gratuitous insults with no
basis in reality?  As per examples above, a lot of free software is
amongst the highest quality software out there.  A lot of hackers
writing free software are amongst the best programmers out there.  Who
the hell are you?